This Public Issues Forum will explore the ethical dimensions of the relationship between business and society. Speakers include philosophers and business ethicists whose work has focused on Corporate Responsibility, Stakeholder Theory, Organizational Ethics, Moral Imagination, and Ethics and Capitalism.

Free and Open to the Public. Refreshments will be served.

Speakers:

R. Edward Freeman, University Professor and Senior Fellow at the Olsson Center for Applied Ethics, University of Virginia: “New Models of Business in Society”

Patricia Werhane, Wicklander Chair in Business Ethics and Director of the Institute for Business and Professional Ethics, DePaul University: “Globalization and its Challenges to CSR and Industrialized Capitalism”

Gary Weaver, Professor of Management, University of Delaware.
Topic: Fostering ethical behavior in business organizations

Chair: Alan Preti, GPPC Board of Directors and Director of the Institute for Ethical Leadership and Social Responsibility at Rosemont College.

Saturday, August 23, 2014

I was reading Probability and Causality: Essays in Honor of Wesley C. Salmon, and was interested to
see it included an annotated bibliography, where Salmon provides contextual
commentary regarding all of his publications up to that time (1988).The first entry was an interesting
surprise.While his post-doctoral work
was squarely in the mid-twentieth century empiricist tradition of philosophy of
science, his MA thesis in 1947 was on the topic “Whitehead’s Conception of
Freedom”, about which he comments:

In his later career, when stretching his empiricist commitments
in search of a realist approach to causation, Salmon developed his own causal
"process” theory (Salmon 1984).No
mention of Whitehead, but perhaps some background inspiration?

“On the basis of personal
experience, I can testify to Reichenbach’s qualities both as a teacher and a
man. I was a raw young graduate student with an M.A. in philosophy from the
University of Chicago when first I went to UCLA in 1947 to work for a
doctorate. At Chicago I had been totally immersed in Whitehead’s philosophy;
ironically, Carnap was at Chicago during those years, but I never took a course
from him. My advisors barely acknowledged his existence, and certainly never
recommended taking any of his classes. Upon arrival at UCLA I was totally
unfamiliar with Reichenbach or his works, but during my first semester I was
stimulated and delighted by his course, ‘Philosophy of Nature’, based upon Atom and Cosmos. Simultaneously, I
continued my intensive studies of Whitehead’s Process and Reality. A severe intellectual tension emerged in my
mind between Whitehead, the scientifically sophisticated metaphysician, and
Reichenbach, the scientifically sophisticated anti-metaphysician.

To the best of my
recollection, the tension grew to crisis proportions when I heard Reichenbach
deliver his masterful Presidential Address, on rationalism and empiricism, to
the Pacific Division of the APA at its meeting in Los Angeles in December of
1947.This lecture was precisely what I –
as a naïve graduate student – needed to make me face the crucial question: on
what conceivable grounds could one make reasonable judgments concerning the
truth or falsity of Whitehead’s metaphysical claims? When I posed this question
to myself, as well as to teachers and fellow graduate students sympathetic to
Whitehead, I received nothing even approaching a satisfactory answer.By the end of that academic year I was a
convinced – though still very naïve – logical empiricist.”

Wednesday, July 09, 2014

First a housekeeping comment.It turns out that this blog went mostly
dormant when I began full time graduate work in philosophy two years ago.It was a wonderful outlet for my thoughts when
I had a different sort of day job, but now I have trouble making time for it. In
any case, I note that its tenth blogiversary recently passed, and I’m grateful
for all who have read or commented over that time.

One thing I’ve been thinking about again is whether our
metaphysical (modal) intuitions are any good.Reading Ladyman and Ross (Everything Must Go) was one trigger for this. Another was reading (but not finishing) Peter
Unger’s All the Power in the World.The former included a strong critique of
contemporary metaphysics, making the case that its disconnection from modern
physics renders it futile.The latter
book can be viewed as L&R’s worst nightmare: a freeform conversion of
imagination into metaphysical conclusions which is completely
unconvincing.(See Katherine Hawley’s
review of L&R here, and Timothy O’Connor’s review of Unger here -- obviously
most contemporary analytic metaphysics is much more disciplined and better argued
than Unger’s book).

Clearly we make mistakes relying on our imagination and common
sense intuitions.What also perhaps could be
better appreciated is the fact that leveraging insights drawn from physics
(implicitly or explicitly) can easily go wrong.This happens both because the physics is outdated (and is always
provisional anyway), and because the formalisms of physics do not and
arguably cannot represent all the relevant aspects of nature.

Still, along with my other interests, I will do metaphysics
as best I can. After all, I only have this one shot at trying to understand the world!

Monday, September 23, 2013

Congratulations to all the teams that took part in the ethics bowl. A team from Cherry Hill High School East won the competition and will represent our region in the national competition in April 2014. It's great that Villanova's Ethics Program, led by Dr. Mark Doorley, again organized the event and that so many volunteer judges and moderators made themselves available.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Also, the second Philadelphia area High School Ethics Bowl will be held on December 7th, again hosted by Villanova University. Contact me if you would like information on volunteering to help with the event (I was a judge last year and it was a great experience).

Carlin Romano’s book, America the Philosophical, argues that philosophy, has a deep and wide role to play in American intellectual life and culture. The degree to which it fulfills this role today, or should do so in the future, is a question which fits naturally into our long-running Public Issues Forum series. A great panel of speakers will join us, and we hope you will participate as well. (Here is an essay by Carlin summarizing his thesis:http://chronicle.com/article/Is-America-Philosophical-/131884/ )

Russellian Monism is
an attractive approach to the mind/body problem. It promises to put both mental
and physical phenomena on a common ontological ground. By providing a place in
nature for the qualitative properties featured in conscious experience, it disarms
prominent conceivability arguments against materialism. Russell’s approach can
be strengthened by employing elements of a more contemporary metaphysical
framework. There is a particularly good
fit with an account of the nature of properties set out by C.B. Martin and John
Heil. Labeled the identity theory of properties, this view posits that properties
are at once dispositional and qualitative.

This paper is
organized as follows. In section one I offer an overview of Russell’s theory. In
section two I briefly show how a key insight from Russell’s work has figured in
contemporary debates in philosophy of mind. Section three takes a closer look
at Russell’s metaphysics; this prepares the way for seeing how his theory might
be modified in light of more recent work. Section four introduces the idea that
the metaphysics of dispositional and categorical properties can play a role in
a Russell-style account. Section five outlines the identity theory of
properties and argues that its features can strengthen Russellian monism. In
section six I consider objections to the modified theory, and discuss where it
needs to be supplemented in order to more fully address the challenges of
explaining mind.

Summary: the body is a pattern of unified activity; the mind
is shaped by the interaction of this pattern with its environment.

To begin, the nature of the human body/mind is founded on
the basic individuation of things; here’s IID7:

And if a number of individuals so
concur in one action that together they are all the cause of one effect, I
consider them all, to that extent, as one singular thing. (p.116)

So a composite individual is defined in terms of the
coordinated action of its parts.

Following the discussion of the parallelism of mind and body
as modes following from the corresponding attributes of God, Spinoza makes some
surprising claims in IIP12 and 13:

Nothing can happen in that body
which is not perceived by the mind […] The object of the idea constituting the
human mind is the body…and nothing else. (p.123)

However, when it comes to human beings, both of these
statements will be superseded by the account which follows.

The key is to understand the nature/form/essence of the
human body as opposed to simple bodies. Here
is the start to the scholium to IIP13:

From these [propositions] we
understand not only that the human mind is united to the body, but also what
should be understood by the union of mind and body.But no one will be able to understand it
adequately, or distinctly, unless he
first knows adequately the nature of our body.For the things we have shown so far are completely general and do not
pertain more to man than to other individuals, all of which, though in different
degrees, are nevertheless animate. (p.124)

So we need to know more about what distinguishes the human
body from other bodies.

Now we move to the interlude on the nature of bodies which follows
IIP13.Spinoza discusses bodies in terms
of their motion and rest – it must be said that he does not successfully
present a complete non-circular account of bodies (there is no definition of a
ground level simple body independent of its motion or vice versa).But overlooking this for present purposes, Spinoza
gives us an account of how a number of bodies can unite to compose a further
composite body or individual.Here’s the
definition following A2``:

When a number of bodies, whether of
the same or of different size, are so constrained by other bodies that they lie
upon one another, or if they so move, whether with the same degree or different
degrees of speed, that they communicate their motions to each other in a
certain fixed matter; we shall say that those bodies are united with one
another and that they all together compose one body or individual, which is
distinguished from the others by this union of bodies. (p.126)

The nature and form of such an individual is defined in
terms of this union.We see here that
the component parts only matter to this nature qua their participation in the unifying
action (consistent with IID7).

L4 strengthens the point by asserting that this nature or
form will be retained upon substitution of like parts (p.126).L5 and L6, by defining the fixed relationship
of motion among the united parts in terms of a ratio of motion of rest, is
intended to convey a notion of yet more flexibility to the composite body to
retain its nature under changing conditions.

The scholium to L7 goes further to contemplate second and
third order composite bodies, each of whose components has different natures
(i.e. different patterns of union), which can maintain their form in myriad additional
circumstances:

And if we proceed in this way to infinity, we
shall easily conceive that the whole of nature is one individual, whose parts,
that is, all bodies, vary in infinite ways, without any change in the whole
individual. (p.127)

This passage foreshadows the human striving toward God’s perfection
that we find later in the Ethics.

Spinoza concludes in the body postulates that the human body
“is composed of a great many individuals of different natures, each of which is
highly composite.”It can “move and
dispose external bodies in a great many ways” (p.128).

These complex characteristics of the body underlie the
complex nature of the human mind, discussed in IIP14 and IIP15.Our ideas about external objects follow from
the affects these have on our complex body. In fact, the subtlety of the complex
body allows Spinoza to define imagination and memory (IIP16 and IIP17) which
adds a critical temporal dimension to the workings of the associated human
mind.

With this in place, the subsequent propositions replace the
simple picture of mind/body union which originally followed from the parallelism
of thought and extension.The mind is associated
with the complex composite body; and constituted as it is by a unified action
of its many different parts, it does not know the body or itself in any simple
or complete manner (IIP19):

The human mind does not know the human body
itself, nor does it know that it exists, except through ideas of affections by
which the body is affected.(p.131)

I interpret this as follows:The body is not simple passive thing sitting in a vacuum, but rather has
a nature defined by an enduring pattern of complex activity (which is capable
of acting as a unified higher order cause).Within the totality of God/Nature, this pattern is defined relative to
all its interactions with the world which lies outside its nature. (Note that this
could include non-essential interactions which take place from “within” the
spatial dimensions of the body as well as “external” bodies.)The mind only knows the body (the pattern) as
it is affected.

In IIP20 and IIP21, another element is introduced which adds
further nuance to the mind, that is, in addition to defining the mind as the
idea of the body, there also exists the idea of the mind (idea of the
idea).So to the extent the mind knows
the affections of the body, it knows the ideas of these affections (IIP22).It follows that as the mind only knows the
body via the affections, it only knows itself “insofar as it perceives the
ideas of the affections of the body” (IIP23, p.133).

Looking ahead, IIP23 is cited when S wants to assert we are
“conscious” of our striving to preserve our being (IIIP9)

I think IIP24 is particularly helpful for deepening our
understanding the human mind and the scope of consciousness:

The
human mind does not involve adequate knowledge of the parts composing the human
body.” Dem.: The parts composing the human body pertain to the essence of
the human body itself only insofar as they communicate their motions to one
another in a certain fixed manner… and not insofar as they can be considered as
individuals, without relation to the human body. (p.133)

The body’s essence is the unified pattern of action.Each part could be separated and interact
with the world in some other manner (and will do so after I die, for instance),
but this has nothing to do with our essence.Nevertheless, God’s idea of
the part includes its connections with a great many ideas which go beyond the
part’s participation in our body’s essence (and thus with the idea that
constitutes our mind).Hence our mind
does not know its parts as individuals.

The picture of the human being here is not that of a lump of
matter, but that of an activity.Not
only that, but the human mind is
shaped by this activity as it continually bumps up against everything else in
its environment. (Again, I note that there can be things “within” the body which
also don’t contribute to the pattern).

While the derivation of IIIP6 and 7 is debated by scholars,
it is certainly the case that the discussion of the nature of humans/composite
individuals in Part II sets the stage very clearly:the striving to preserve the unified activity
of its parts is the essence of such an individual.

(Note: nothing distinguishes humans/living things/other
things in terms of ontological categories: differences are due to degrees of
complexity in pattern and interactions.)

Sunday, July 29, 2012

[UPDATE: 15 May 2013; edited for clarity]
As mentioned earlier here, Bertrand Russell’s work in his book The Analysis of Matter was dealt a blow by mathematician M.H.A."Max"Newman. Russell had built an argument supporting partial realism about the physical world. He said that while we are only acquainted with our percepts, there are causal connections between these and unperceived events external to the perceiver. He gave reasons to think that as a result, a system of relations among percepts can share the same structure as that of causally connected but unperceived events. We can therefore infer a great deal about the structure of the physical world. Newman pointed out that using conventional set-theoretic definitions of these terms, a shared structure in fact would not offer much information at all about the external world; formally any collection of things (of a sufficient cardinality) can be organized in relations so as to have a given structure.

Newman’s clearly argued and thoughtful paper, “Mr. Russell’s Causal Theory of Perception,” (also posted here) while delivering a negative result on this crucial point, was nonetheless sympathetic toward Russell’s project. Newman offered a suggestion as to what would be required in order to have a more meaningful result. He said we need to have, in addition to our individual percepts and the notion of a shared structure, some direct acquaintance with relations (and he points out that in some passages this sort of “modified theory” is what Russell seems to have in mind):

The conclusion that has been reached is that to maintain the view that something besides their existence can be known about the unperceived parts of the world it is necessary to admit direct apprehension of what is meant by the statement that two unperceived events are causally adjoined, i.e., happen near each other, temporally and spatially, or overlap, or do something of the sort. The central doctrine is then that while of percepts we have a qualitative knowledge, of other events all that can legitimately be inferred is their structure with regard to a certain directly known relation which may be called “causal proximity”(p.148 emphasis original)

In addition to the abstract structure, knowledge of the relation of causal proximity would give us leverage to extend our knowledge to the specific system of causal relations among the unperceived events (though still not their intrinsic qualities, in line with the “clear-cut” unmodified theory).
Newman also points out potential disadvantages of introducing this modification: it adds an additional primitive notion of acquaintance or “direct apprehension” which needs to be better defined; it also might open the door to questioning why we can’t invoke even more sorts of direct knowledge of non-structural aspects of the world.
He concluded the paper in this way:

It appears, then, that although a modified form of Mr. Russell’s theory makes an important assertion about our knowledge of the external world, a good deal of further argument will be necessary to show that this assertion is true. (p.148)

Russell wrote a letter to Newman following the publication of this paper (it is included in the second volume of Russell’s autobiography). In the letter, Russell conceded the argument and went on to say:

It was quite clear to me, as I read your article, that I had not really intended to say what in fact I did say, that nothing is known about the physical world except its structure. I had always assumed spacio-temporal continuity with the world of percepts, that is to say, I had assumed that there might be co-punctuality between percepts and non-percepts, and even that one could pass by a finite number of steps from one event to another compresent with it, from one end of the universe to another. And co-punctuality I regarded as a relation which might exist among percepts and is itself perceptible. (p. 259, emphasis original).

Newman’s commentary above sketches a notion of perceiving “causal proximity” or the idea of events being spatio-temporally near each other or perhaps overlapping. Russell singles out the notion of perceiving co-punctuality. If events overlap or are simultaneous, perhaps the notion of directly perceiving a relation between them is explicable.

As I discussed before, Russell’s later book, Human Knowledge, did conclude that we must have some primitive (“animal” or “biological”) grasp of causation in order to have scientific knowledge. He also reiterated key themes from The Analysis of Matter (including, for example, the role of simultaneity in his theory of compresence). I didn’t see in my reading, though, that he specifically built on the notion of perceiving causal relations via co-punctuality as discussed in his letter to Newman.

Monday, June 18, 2012

I cannot remember who tipped me to this 1972 article in Science by physicist Philip W. Anderson called "More is Different". It is an exploration of the notions of reduction and emergence. The main thrust of Anderson's argument is familiar:

The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and construct the universe. In fact, the more the elementary particle physicists tell us about the nature of the fundamental physical laws, the less relevance they seem to have to the very real problems in the rest of science, much less to those of society
The constructionist hypothesis breaks down when confronted with the twin difficulties of scale and complexity. The behavior of large and complex aggregates of elementary particles, it turns out, is not to be understood in terms of a simple extrapolation of the properties of a few particles. Instead, at each level of complexity entirely new properties appear...(p.393)

The article is worthwhile for a number of very nice briefly described examples of symmetry breaking and properties which emerge with scale.

There is a absurdly simple insight lurking in these sorts of discussions which I now belated appreciate. We all realize that coarse-grained descriptions of phenomena which neglect fine details will be limited in their accuracy by definition. But while reductive analysis of natural systems is extremely fruitful, it is also always an idealization. Experimenters work hard to break down and isolate some phenomenon, and models and theories are constructed to best capture it. The environment needs to be screened out -- it is "noise" which we abstract from. But what is lost in this idealization is not trivial. In nature, there are no isolated systems, no ceteris paribus conditions (in fact, there is absolutely no reason to think the universe as a whole is some sharply bounded closed system).

When this is considered, emergent properties at higher levels of scale lose the sense of being especially surprising or mysterious.